Creating a Field Guide in the Classroom

As our final project for the Redwood Forest, the students make their own field guides.  When they are done, I laminate them and they can take the field guides to camp.  It is a great activity that incorporates note taking, research, non-linguistic representation, and a little creativity.  Here is the process if you want to make a field guide with your students...

field guide notes in interactive notebook

The first thing my students do is spend time taking notes on the species of the forest.  They used a combination of resources that included pamphlets, other field guides, and the internet.  They put these notes in their interactive notebooks so they can also use them on their test.

When they are finished, we check them over for mistakes, and then they are ready to start the final product!


First, they copy their notes into pre-made boxes.  This is so they don't run out of room on their final piece of card stock and if they make a mistake, they can just get a new box, instead of starting their project all over.

boxes for field guide notes

Then, they get pictures of all the species that are included in their field guide.  I spend A LOT of time on Google images to find black and white pictures or line drawings of all of these plants, trees, and animals.  They are required to color the plants and animals the correct colors.

field guide pictures

Once they have done their boxes and pictures, they are ready to cut and glue.  I give them a piece of white card stock.  It tends to hold up a lot better than just plain white construction paper.  When they are all done, I like to laminate them just in case it rains at camp :)  Here are some examples of the finished products...

front cover of field guide

inside of field guide

This can be done for any biome or ecosystem project.  It could even just include species that you find around your school or in your neighborhood.  They love making them and love taking them out in the field even more!

Making Posters - PDF style

Here is my latest poster for my unit in the Redwood Forest.  I have taken this beautiful drawing of the layers of the redwood forest by Cynthia Linsenbardt and enlarged it for this poster.  Now I have a big version for the wall and the kids have their own little version in their notebooks.  I am totally behind the curve, but for those of you that are there with me, here are the directions.

I rarely have time to even go to pee during the day, much less take a file over to the local copy place to be enlarged into a poster.  Plus, my posters usually occur on a whim and I am not patient enough to wait around for my poster to be made when I can make it myself.  So, I finally googled how to enlarge stuff and this is what I found...

STEP ONE:  convert your picture to a PDF, if it isn't already

STEP TWO:  open your PDF and select "print" from the File Menu

STEP THREE:  go down to "page scaling" and use the drop down menu, choose to "tile" your pages

STEP FOUR:  decide how much bigger you want it to be and change the tile scale percentage, if you play around a little with different numbers, it will show you how big/ how many pages it will be

STEP FIVE: print, cut, and glue your pages together

This is great for classroom mural projects, making things larger for anchor charts or walls, or just making your own posters!

Picture credit:  Cynthia Linsenbardt, and the field notebook used by http://outdoorscience.com/

Ancient Egypt - Art Project

We are long since past studying Ancient Egypt in my class, but I wanted to go back and share this SUPER easy art project that all the kids are successful with.  All you need is the following materials to make this happen...

• gold wrapping paper (cut into 10"x14" pieces)
• cardboard or card stock 9"x12"
• sharpies
• copies of Egyptian coloring pages
• paperclips

Have the kids wrap their piece of gold paper around their piece of card stock or cardboard, then glue the back edges down.  Each kid should have 2 paperclips to hold down their coloring page onto the gold paper.  Remind them that the paper CANNOT move once they have started.

Have them trace over the lines of the coloring page with pressure.  This will leave an imprint of the lines on the gold paper.  Once they have completely traced the picture, then they should take off the coloring page.  They will be able to see the lines of the picture in the gold paper.  Have them use a sharpie and trace over those lines in black.  You should end up with something that looks like this (yes, a kid did this!).

King Tut's Mask